1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to databases and their use where certain users require independent international language capabilities and has particular applicability to international business records.
2. Background Information
As businesses have become internationalized, the ability of a business to be able to do business with customers around the world is of paramount importance. Therefore the ability to establish customer loyalty programs by using the mails for sending information, sales promotions, policy changes and the like, or even billing statements, to individual customers throughout the world should be easily accomplished. However, this seemingly simple business task is significantly hampered when the database keeps records for individuals in languages that are not local to the country and culture in which they reside. Even a superficial review of the basic characteristics of ten (10) of the common language scripts or writing sets provides a window into the difficulties, particularly in providing things like addressing for envelopes to be mailed to customers around the world. The languages that come from Latin for instance are alphabetic (such as English, French, Italian, and German), as are the Cerulean Greek languages. However, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tai, Indic, Hebrew and Arabic languages are not alphabetic languages. Japanese and Korean languages are syllabic in form, but none of the other languages are. Tai and Indic languages are semi-syllabic with vowel signs, and Hebrew and Arabic are consonantal. Only the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages use ideograms (like Kanji) and Korean doesn""t use as many ideographic characters as Japanese, with some Korean documents having no ideograms at all.
In just looking at the characters, multi-byte representation is required for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and multi-byte character representation is also required for sub-sets of Latin languages if they are to include all pre-composed accented Latin characters. In five (5) of the ten (10) language groups mentioned, non-European numerals are in use. And in two (2) of them the text is typically right justified and bi-directional. Spacing, word wrapping, and justification vary all over the map for the ten (10) language groups.
However, in thinking about the requirements in keeping business records in a database, one may parse the kinds of data kept and simplify the problem based on a taxonomy of information types one develops. Accordingly, many of the concerns, which appear in viewing the languages as text documents, disappear. For example, flight information will in the foreseeable future always be in English (Latin character set), or at least the part of it that is used for the airline-accepted codes for airports (MSP=Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport, for example), and the flight times and similar information is are all standardized in format. Also, one need not write entire sentences to store addresses and names for an airline customer, although having such information in a local country language format can be critical for getting country mailings to such customers. Therefore one does not need to account for rules of grammar, and various other niceties one usually associates with translating text. Accordingly, many of the problems one commonly imagines need to be resolved to have some information communicated accurately between languages can be avoided by viewing the problem in the limited manner of one that make available nothing but business records for retention and transmission.
Accordingly, through viewing the problem in its most basic sense, the inventor""s have settled upon the use of Unicode, which provides a unique number (or code) for every character of every language. Thus, Unicode provides the underpinning of a system that covers the most basic requirements needed to solve the particular problem of being able to address mailings to customers, that is, storing any language text, while for all practical purposes avoiding any actual translation costs.
Thus, many of the complexities described for language translation and developing a system for collation in a data processing system having distinct sets of information such as in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,157,606 and 5,873,111 are avoided with this invention.
With this perspective, the mailing information in local language form will be the only thing needed to be retained to establish complex customer loyalty systems and to handle most customer transactions and to make such systems work in the international business arena. How this is applied in practice will be discussed below.